The exit bill is May’s last card to play

One assertion never uttered by the Government anymore is that no Brexit deal is better than a bad one. When Theresa May became Prime Minister in July 2016 it was often on her lips to exemplify a determination to walk away from the negotiating table if progress was unsatisfactory. But for the threat to be anything other than empty rhetorical posturing, preparations had to be made for a clean and abrupt break.

Although some preparations have been made, they are perfunctory – and, as we report today, Mrs May won’t even let her ministers talk about them, which seems to defeat the object of using them to extract concessions. As Sir Ivan Rogers, the former UK ambassador to Brussels, has pointed out, if the Government were serious then it should have set up new regulatory bodies necessary to take over from the EU. These take years to create and require statutory backing. But nothing has happened.

Brexiteer Conservatives have so far been prepared to go along with the Government’s tactics, fearing they would be left with nothing at all if they brought Mrs May down. Now they are urging the Prime Minister to revive her threat, even though it would sound more hollow than ever. The truth is that this threat became redundant the moment Mrs May lost her parliamentary majority last year, because the likelihood of it being acceptable to the Commons is minuscule. That is why the Prime Minister is being pushed inexorably towards a series of regulatory and trading arrangements that mimic continued membership of the EU but without any input at a political level.

We are only a few weeks from another crucial EU summit at which much of the Brexit endgame is due to be played out, notably over the status of the Irish border. The only useful card left in Mrs May’s poker hand is the money. We have promised to hand over £40bn, without which there will be a very large hole in the EU budget. Another assertion that is heard less now than it once was is nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. We need to hear it said once again about the Brexit divorce bill.

Yes, the Government is politically weak, but Britain is institutionally and economically strong. Evidently Mrs May does not want to confront Parliament or the country with a bad deal that we have no option but to take. So to avoid that calamity she needs to play hardball with the money. If the EU wants it, they need to give us something more in return than has been on offer so far.